With dove-like steps, a fair recognition of certain female musicians is emerging - little by little and at the cost of a certain effort. A laudable effort, but unfortunately the "Clara Schumann or Fanny Mendelssohn effect" sometimes does a disservice to their contemporaries or to those who are still alive today: these female composers (rightly) regaining a place in our concert halls become alibis for looking no further - and guaranteeing themselves a feminist endorsement all the same. Recording a piece by Clara Schumann doesn't make a musician a militant for the cause of women composers. For our third episode devoted to vinyl covers, here are five female composers who have stood out for their originality and who deserve to feature more often in our programming.

A magnificent drawing by Judith Lerner - an artist who would go on to produce a plethora of covers for the Composers Recordings Inc. label devoted to modern and contemporary American repertoire - opens this selection and honors two major figures of American modernism: Dane Rudhyar, French expatriate, father of humanist astrology, composer and great inspiration of new-age, and Ruth Crawford. Born in Ohio in 1901, Ruth Crawford-Seeger studied music with her mother before going on to Chicago, where she received her first musical shock from Djane Lavoie Herz, a young composer who had studied with Alexander Scriabin a few years earlier during a stay in Brussels. (For the record: Scriabin lived in Brussels for over a year, teaching piano and composition. It was here that he met the Symbolist painter Jean Delville, who was busy with his large-scale painting Prométhée, which inspired Scriabin to compose his own Prométhée). By chance, one of his great Canadian pupils - Alfred La Liberté - sent him his best students, among them a certain Djane Lavoie, who returned to the United States to spread the Scriabinian word and theosophy (ancestor of New Age). Ruth Crawford was forever marked by this experience. Her encounter with Henry Cowell and the poet Carl Sandburg was also decisive, but listening to his PréludesScriabin's mystical influence can be heard more clearly than that of his compatriots. His writing is sure and dazzling. His unmistakably modern Preludes form one of the most innovative cycles of the 20th century. Her union with the composer and musicologist Charles Seeger produced three children, all of whom went on to have immense careers in folk music; the most famous being none other than the pioneer of folk music: Pete Seeger, who died in 2014. And if Scriabin's cosmic universe could somehow be found in the wonderful songs of Ruth Crawford's son, a modernist before his time! 

In 2017 Joanna Brouk was a guest at the Variations festival in Nantes, and after a hiatus of more than thirty years was back on stage to offer French audiences her meditative, moving music. A few days later, she left this world and all the music she had in her head for good. This former pupil of Robert Ashley and Terry Riley left us with few recordings or scores, but this double album released in 2016 by Numero Group and sweetly titled "Hearing Music"(note the magnificent cover depicting her) brings together a whole host of recordings that were about to end up in the rubbish bin before the label's producer Douglas Mcgowan finally managed to contact her and convince her to release all those forgotten cassettes. This compilation brings us the best of Joanna Brouk, and fortunately, her best is prolific. We discover a music on the border between minimalism, ambient and new-age (again) of great beauty, very pure and natural. Nature sounds are subtly and coherently integrated with acoustic flutes reminiscent of primitive atmospheres. At no point do we fall into the pitfall of this type of music, namely: giving the impression of listening to relaxation or massage music. No, Joanna Brouk's music avoids these pitfalls, because the pure, unadulterated sounds, unadorned with rhythms of any kind, make this music sound serious, composed and thought-out. You'd think you were listening to music from another time and another world. And it certainly is.
" I like the sound between the notes and the spaces between the silences. I like to say that I play with silence, that my music evolves according to this silence. It always comes back to silence.

New-age has a very bad press in France, and in the eyes of many seems to be a frivolous, syncretistic bricolage of isolated pseudo-transcendental beliefs aimed at appeased spiritual awakening. In short, hippie verbiage. In music, the results are sometimes astonishing and often disparate. Some mix Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream, some of Keith Jarrett's experiments, the recently deceased Vangelis, not forgetting the great exponents Kitaro and Jan Hammer. New-age music has come back into fashion in recent years, thanks to the recognition of certain artists. This trend demands a certain awakening and forces us to shed our distrustful Western preconceptions. The delicate music of young Ana Roxannesometimes labeled ambient, minimalist or new-age, has been booming in recent years, and rightly so. After listening to an album such as this one - to be released on Leaving Records in 2019 and cryptically titled "~ ~ ~" - you can't help but be overwhelmed. - you can't help but be overwhelmed by this music that (too) comes from another world. In fact, it was a near-death experience that gave Ana Roxanne the spiritual edge to her music. Her frail, right-toned voice, her subtle electronic sounds, as if lost there, give her music time to unfold, and allow us to immerse ourselves in all its sonic colors.

Emahoy Tsegué-Mariam Guèbru is 98 years old today, still living in an Ethiopian monastery in Jerusalem, and last we heard, although tested by her respectable age, music occupies all her days. In 2006, the Les Éthiopiques label, founded by Francis Falceto, released a disc of her finest piano works played by herself, under the name "Ethiopiques 21". The record went viral! Her career took off again, and the whole world began to take a renewed interest in this unique figure of Ethiopian music. Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1923 into a well-off, literate family, Yèwèbdra Guèbrou (real name) was taken to Switzerland after an exile to be educated in a boarding school for girls. A few years later, in Cairo, Egypt, she pursued musical studies, studying the violin. Prevented at the age of twenty-one from continuing her musical studies and perfecting her skills in England, she gave in and entered a convent, where she had the leisure to teach music, practice her piano and, above all, compose. Her work is prolific, but unfortunately still too little known. Most of her works are for piano or piano/voice, and her music is often compared to that of Erik Satie, Brian Eno, Alice Coltrane, Charles Mingus or Bill Evans (as if all these composers had to be cited to give her a guarantee of quality), but in truth these influences, often repeated from article to article, don't really make themselves felt when you listen seriously. Mariam Guèbru's music is like no other: you can clearly detect Ethiopian modes and colors (despite the purists who sometimes even deny her the inspiration of her origins), you can sometimes hear a few Chopin-like inflections, a few reminiscences of jazz, but that's about it. What you hear is a unique personality with unprecedented musical accents, repetitive melodic twists far removed from minimalism but akin to mantras or other ritual music, and a heightened sensitivity. Today, more than 16 years after her rediscovery, her music remains sadly underdeveloped. In recent years, the marvellous Israeli pianist Maya Dunietz has done an enormous amount of work to defend and perform this spellbinding music. She has worked directly with Mariam Guèbru and rewritten a number of her works. Unfortunately, Mariam Guèbru's music is not very accessible to musicians wishing to play it (obtaining a score costs over $100). To the publishers who read us, hello! 

Julius Eastman is a minimalist composer from the underground whose tragic fate is now resurfacing in concert halls, also at a dove's pace. And that's a good thing. But this recognition didn't come by itself. Since his death in 1990, a composer who worked alongside him for many years has been working relentlessly to reinstate 'Eastman in musical history: Mary Jane Leach. This composer, who has worked with the likes of Arthur Russell, Ellen Fullman, Peter Zummo, Philip Corner and Arnold Dreyblata, has put this quest for recognition of Eastman ahead of her own work for almost seven years, and seems to be recognized in France only for this, which is regrettable because her work is rich, beautiful and inspiring. (F)lute Songs , released on the Blume label in 2018, brings together four pieces for flute and voice composed between 1985 and 2018. Fascinated by Steve Reich's multi-track superpositions, in these pieces played by Manuel Zurria she explores all the uses offered by the possibility of re-recording oneself. "In the late 1970s, I used to practice playing and singing with tapes I'd made myself holding long notes," she recounts. It had started as an exercise in intonation, and ended in a fascination with sound phenomena: tones of difference, combination and interference." Mary Jane Leach is still very active, composing and travelling. It's urgent that venues in France think of her, because her music is beautiful, bold and original.

François Mardirossian